Leap Day: What to do with an extra 24 hours?

It only comes along once every four years, so on Feb. 29 what will you do to celebrate? You might also ask what you can get for free.

For the first time ever, Disney is opening their Disneyland and Magic Kingdom Park for a full 24 hours on Feb. 29. But if you can’t make it to the Magic Kingdom, other vendors have also gotten into the spirit of Leap Day by offering perks and freebies, according to Passion for Savings blog and various other media reports.

Denny’s: Get 29 percent off your check on Wednesday through Sunday with a coupon. Expires March 3.

Outback Steakhouse: Wish an Outback fan born on Leap Year Day happy birthday on Facebook and be entered to win free Outback for four years.

Yahoo News has a brief rundown on why we get this extra day once every four years:

Why we need Leap Day: Usually, our year is 365 days long. Except that it’s not: A full cycle of seasons is actually 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 16 seconds long, or about 365.25 days. Over time, the extra quarter of a day adds up, and without Leap Day, the calendar would be one day out of sync with the seasons. After 30 years, it would be about a week off, and after 100 years, it would be nearly a month off.

Bing Quock, the assistant director of Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences, explains, “Leap Day is added as a correction to the calendar so that it stays in sync with the seasons … that way, the seasons start on the same day from year to year to year.”

The history of Leap Year: Leap Year has been around for 2,000 years, since Julius Caesar created the 365-day calendar, although Caesar’s astronomer, Sosigenes, gets credit for adding an extra day in February every four years.